I’m not sure how calmly I can talk about today’s developments in New Orleans. Let’s take a quick inventory. You had:* Thousands of hungry, thirsty, sick and desperate people crowding evacuation points amidst dead bodies and ongoing violence.* Stretched-to-the-max and sometimes beseiged police officers having to siphon gasoline from parked cars to patrol the streets, and after stopping looters in stores, expropriating goods to keep themselves hydrated, fed and clothed.* More failed efforts to fix the breaches in the levee system, even as new flooding was temporarily halted by an equalization of water levels between the city and Lake Pontchartrain (in other words, maximum flooding).* A second straight televised speech by the President of the United States that exhibited an eery disconnection from events on the ground, and perhaps a panicked realization that this is quickly becoming a potential political disaster for the administration.* A public comment by the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representativescasually suggesting that New Orleans might not be worth rebuilding.Eventually federal help will arrive; Guard units did start showing up this evening to restore order, and evacuations from the Convention Center and the Superdome resumed.But the suffering endured by the most vulnerable people in New Orleans in the interim cannot be erased, and the damage to the city–physically, economically, and morally–during the last few days of chaos will make the task of recovery and reconstruction (assuming Denny Hastert lets it go forward) vastly more extensive, expensive, and potentially futile.This has been another one of those unacknowledged “accountability moments” for the Bush administration. The president is not responsible for Acts of God, but by God, he should be responsible for acts of the federal government when Americans most need it.